ISIS–Professional Military Force, Projecting Power Where US Troops Cannot Go

The US are trying to salvage the remnants of their comic-book Syrian narrative, hiding behind the transparent diversionary claim the Russians are bombing “non-ISIS rebels”, hoping, forlornly no one will be smart enough to realise this essentially means “al Qaeda/al Nusra”, and amounts to an admission the US is working with the group they used to claim were the embodiment of evil.

Not just working with, but defending hysterically. Watching Ashton Carter at the podium issuing barely concealed threats of retribution to another nuclear power, it’s hard to comprehend that he’s doing this because Russia dared to bomb the alleged perpetrators of 9/11.

Naturally the tame western media aids and abets this bankrupt storyline, but they can’t save it. It’s garbage, and even after the spinners have finished spinning, it still looks like garbage. But the lie has to be maintained, even while it becomes increasingly obvious no one believes it, because the alternative is impossible to contemplate.

The collapse of the “we’re bombing the bad guys” narrative doesn’t just completely unravel the accepted reality of what is going down in Syria, it opens up numerous other worm-filled cans. Questions inevitably proliferate that go far beyond current events. How long has Washington been funding al Qaeda while declaring them enemies? How routine is false narrative like this? How blurred is the distinction between real and pretend? How many people is it acceptable to kill in fuzzy semi-pretend-war with pretend-enemies who may still die? How much of our current world view is contaminated with someone’s convenient fiction and message-laden fantasy?

That ISIS/Islamic State/al Qaeda/al Nusra, or whatever new name we want to use, were to some extent packaged and marketed as designer fear porn seems beyond doubt. Nothing else explains their unparalleled success as media-manipulators or their immunity to any kind of retribution. It’s possible a lot of the guys in the ubiquitous promo pics never did anything more violent than pose with a black flag or an assault rifle. But some of them apparently did a lot more than that. They didn’t just take the money and fight either. They tortured people. En masse. On film.

Where was the line drawn? When we are being told in the MSM that British SAS forces “dressed up as ISIS” in order – allegedly – to destroy “IS equipment”, we can see that line is getting blurry at best. How many of those iconic ISIS pictures are “real” ISIS, and how many are western force “dressed up”, or obliging actors doing a bit of propaganda? Where did agitprop “theatre” become western soldiers running round waving ISIS flags? When did they both meld into proxy warriors gone out of control and making snuff films? Was there a line at all? Did the western backers who supplied the trucks and gave the SAS those fake flags also pay for the orange jump suits, the burning cages, the decapitation knives? Did they know what they were doing?

How deep and nasty is the psycho-nightmare of US Middle East “policy”?